History as she is wrote
By Terry Graves
web posted August 23, 2004
No teacher, but every textbook, left behind.
More than a hundred years ago one A.W. Tuer chose this name
for his guide to English-Portuguese conversation: English As She
is Spoke. I am reminded of this by an August 9 dispatch from
the AP's Jennifer Coleman about a chain of private schools
whose curriculum is so "riddled with errors" that outraged judges
and attorneys general in four states have acted to close them
down. The schools, run by Daniel Gossai, target Hispanic
immigrants and charge between $450 and $1450 for a ten-week
course. According to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer,
the schools claimed the course "… would lead to a valid diploma
and help them get into college, find better jobs and get financial
aid." But the course's only teaching material was a slim volume
filled, Ms. Coleman continues, with howlers such as:
1. The United States has 53 states but the "flag has not yet been
updated to reflect the addition of the last three states" - Hawaii,
Alaska and Puerto Rico.
2. World War II began in 1938 and ended in 1942.
3. There are two houses of Congress - the Senate and the
House, and "one is for Democrats and the other is for the
Republicans, respectively."
Mr. Gossai's textbook should have been called History As She
is Wrote – it is no wonder the various state law enforcement
officials are so exercised. Here are some more textbook
stunners:
4. Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo.
5. Jihad means merely "to struggle," to do one's best to resist
temptation and overcome evil.
6. Women earn only 71 per cent of what men do. (The former
head of the Congressional Budget Office, economist June
O'Neill, said that for employees "similar in their experience and
life situations" there is practically no difference between men's
pay and women's.
7. Sherman's troops burned Atlanta. (In fact they burned only
the public buildings; most of the destruction had already been
accomplished by Hood's Confederates.)
8. In the 7th century, Cordoba, Spain was an Islamic city, the
Grand Mosque was already built, and the Crusades were in
progress – all incorrect by one to four centuries.
9. These are historical facts – the Archangel Gabriel revealed
God's word to the Prophet Mohammed, Adam built the Kabaa
in Mecca, and jinns are made from fire and can be either good
or evil.
10. There had been a $40,000 bounty for the capture of Harriet
Tubman. (There is no evidence of one higher than $100, placed
after she herself escaped.)
Science is not spared its share of errors:
11. A map shows the equator running through Texas and
Florida. (I suspect this is a result of global warming.)
12. A picture of a compass shows east and west reversed.
13. Six orders of birds are listed, all of them fictitious
14. Memorizing the value of pi is an example of deductive
reasoning.
15. A photograph of Linda Ronstadt is captioned: "silicon
crystal"; in an earlier version of the textbook the pop diva was a
"vacuum triode."
16. The moon's mass is 1/6 of the Earth's. (It is 1/81.)
17. Periodic tables do not include new elements years after they
have been added.
As well as outright errors, there are biases and dubious
interpretations:
18. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were "a married couple who held
radical views."
19. American perceptions of the Japanese militarists were
shaped not by real events – such as the Rape of Nanking, the
Bataan Death March, or other Japanese atrocities – but by
American "propaganda."
20. All of the American Indians are lumped into one
homogeneous culture, all of the Europeans into another, and all
Africans into a third, and each of them contributed equally to the
present American culture. (Expect a massive re-write, now that
Hispanics outnumber blacks.)
21. American participation in World War II is given 20 pages,
while there are 26 pages about the home front, emphasizing
discrimination against women and racial minorities.
22. George Washington is allotted six lines of text, compared to
six and a half pages for Marilyn Monroe.
Besides items that are tendentious or flatly wrong, there are what
we shall kindly call irregularities:
23. A prominent scientist is advertised as having reviewed the
textbook for accuracy. (The scientist says he has never seen it.)
24. Its publisher contributes heavily to the reelection campaign of
California's superintendent of instruction.
25. Of the textbook's listed authors, none were actually involved
in writing or reviewing it.
26. Successive versions of the textbook, sold as new editions,
are virtually unchanged and include the same errors and
anachronisms, such as the same age for tennis player Venus
Williams, wrong by two years in even the first edition.
27. The text and graphics includes large-scale placement
advertising of private products such as Levi jeans.
28. There are repeated references to the publisher's own website
on something called the interNET [sic].
This is only a sample of the errors, dubious interpretations,
biases, and irregularities. How can so many be associated with
Daniel Gossai's one "slim volume"? As it happens, we can blame
him for only the first three. All the others are from textbooks that
major publishers like Prentice-Hall and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill
have been selling by the tens of millions to public elementary,
middle, and high schools throughout the United States. These
examples, and dozens more, of how-not-to-write-a-textbook
are readily available on the "interNET" at these and other sites --
from the AFA of Georgia (numbers 4, 22, 25), Forbes.com (23,
24), CNN (11, 12), William J. Bennetta's The Textbook Letter
(5-10, 13, 14, 18-21, 26-28), and John Hubisz, a North
Carolina State professor of physics who led a two year study for
the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (15-17).
No story has mentioned what firm published the textbook
Gossai's schools use. More importantly, no one seems prepared
to say how well or ill the graduates of his schools fare on tests
given for, say, GED certification. Even lacking this validation,
judges and prosecutors are taking legal action against Gossai. If
they are coming down so hard on him for his alleged bilking of
adult Hispanic immigrants out of thousands of their dollars, then
these authorities must be in avid pursuit of the publishers of
shoddy public school textbooks and of the people who used
billions in tax money to inflict them on our children. Right?
Wrong. There is no public outcry about "education contractors"
or analogies to $600 Pentagon hammers, no demands for
refunds, no civil suits, and no publishing houses' executives doing
perp walks. The reasons why are doubtless many, but not least
would be that most of the employees involved in buying the
books are members of powerful unions, and the president of
those selling the books, the American Association of Publishers,
is former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder. So in the highly
unlikely event Schroeder ever were hauled before a
Congressional committee to provide details on Napoleon's
victory at Waterloo, the grilling would start something like this:
"So, Pat, how're the grandkids?"
How about self-policing by the education, uh, professionals who
select textbooks for public schools? (By the way, they use the
word adopt instead of buy, presumably because of the latter's
implication of tawdry commercialism.) These professionals have
their own organization: NASTA, which stands for, one of its web
pages tells us, National Association of School Textbook
Administrattors [sic]. Apparently the "administrattors" carried
over to their web site the skills they had finely honed in reviewing
textbooks for half-billion dollar adoptions. NASTA's level of
concern over textbook errors is almost below sea level – the
agenda for its summer meeting includes that topic as one of
eleven to be covered in one three-hour session, and only one of
the respective state reports from the last two years mentions it,
and that only in boilerplate as something it would be nice to
avoid. The only specific subject linked from NASTA's home
page is the Overweight Backpack Phenomena [sic] that, I was
relieved to learn, turns out to be in reality a single overblown
phenomenon. That is, despite the media hype and overreaction
by some state governments, most backpack injuries have nothing
to do with the weight of the backpack. Instead, they were
caused by "… ‘nonstandard' use of a backpack, including
tripping over it or getting hit with one." So NASTA's only
subject link is to a topic even it found to be trivial.
Of course, overweight backpacks are to be expected when one
textbook can be, as the American School Board Journal noted,
well over 1000 pages long, with "… splashy illustrations, large
type, short sidebars, and funky headlines, all set off by expanses
of white space." The same article summed them up as "20-pound
packages of glitz." (Such great thudding clunkers resemble the
Pentagon's $600 hammers in another way: you can use either to
pound nails.) Size does make a difference, and thousand-page
textbooks are to be expected when one recalls what economy of
scale means to a publisher: money. Multiply this by millions of
textbooks, and it is a marvel there are still trees left standing in
North America. So the crux of the complaint about the Gossai
schools' textbook may be that it does not weigh enough.
The US Department of Education, Jimmy Carter's gift to the
teachers' unions, seems even less interested in textbook errors
than is NASTA. The DOE Web site is enormous but neither it
nor other sites linked to it mention textbook critics like Hubisz or
Bennetta. There are 34 mentions of the Hubisz' sponsor, the
Packard Foundation, none of them about his study of science
textbooks. If the Department of Education is on top of the
textbook problem, it is only to cover it up.
Unfortunately, textbooks are crucial to learning. As the American
School Board Journal reports, "… between 80 and 90 percent
of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven…
[T]he Big Four textbook publishers – McGraw-Hill, Harcourt,
Houghton Mifflin, and Pearson [that] have swallowed other
publishing companies and made them imprints – have established
a de facto national curriculum." The Journal reports another facto
that reinforces this monopoly: "Driving the [textbook] market are
four key states -- California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina
– that provide state funding for texts approved by their
textbook-adoption committees. Together, these states accounted
for $971 million of the $3.3 billion in U.S. textbook sales in
1998, the most recent year for which sales figures are available."
This is frightening, and not just because of the examples cited (or
that two of the four key states lie on the equator!). More
generally, the quality of the twelve most popular science
textbooks for middle-schoolers is so low, Hubisz concluded, that
none had an acceptable level of accuracy. An example of the
effect of this inaccuracy, as reported by CNN in 2002:
"For 10 years, William Schmidt, a statistics professor at
Michigan State University, has looked at how U.S. students
stack up against students in other countries in math and science.
"In fourth-grade, we start out pretty well, near the top of the
distribution among countries; by eighth-grade, we're around
average, and by 12th-grade, we're at the bottom of the heap,
outperforming only two countries, Cyprus and South Africa."
The American School Board Journal also cites Schmidt, who
blames U.S. textbooks, "… because the content of textbooks in
different countries correlates very closely to what children learn
in those countries…" In Schmidt's own words, U.S. "books just
do not hold up by international standards."
The results are similar in history. The Christian Science Monitor
cited a 2001 US Department of Education report that "…more
than half of [American] high-schoolers thought the US fought
World War II in partnership with Germany, Japan, or Italy.
Sixty-five percent couldn't link the Boston Tea Party to the
American Revolution." These data about American high-school
students came to mind when I happened to read an article by an
18-year-old woman who is pushing to lower the voting age to
16. Frightening, indeed. (In the young woman's defense, it may
be that she merely thought her campaign would look good on her
college applications -- "soccer: 2,3,4; French club: 3,4; amended
the Constitution: 4." Colleges just eat that sort of thing up.)
It is not as if the schoolshave no alternative to these cheesy and
expensive textbooks. As Bennetta pointed out, there are dozens
of solid historians today, "writing trenchant books of history and
biography, free of ideological claptrap." And there are thousands
of books available to schools for free, over the "interNET." (We
may as well finally put all those computers to some good use.)
Project Gutenberg, for one, offers nearly 12,000 freebies. Of
course, then the public schools might have to settle for writers of
the caliber of Thucydides, Gibbon, and Franklin, but every idea
has its drawbacks.
Why are public school textbooks so bad? CNN quoted the
conclusion of Hubisz' report for the Packard Foundation:
"Publishers now employ more people to censor books for
content that might offend any organized lobbying group, than
they do to check the correctness of facts." Unchecked errors
spread: in 1999 the Boston Globe reported, "Some educators
have traced the transmission of errors from one textbook to
another and compare the process to the spread of a virus
through a population." The Globe was too delicate to say so, but
this "virus" smacks of plagiarism by textbook authors too rushed,
lazy, or inept to research even reputable secondary sources.
They settle for stealing from each other.
One defense of these publishers might offer is that they have
nothing wrong and provide "a service to individuals within the
community." But, wait, according to joannejacobs.com, this is
what Gossai's attorney, Scott Furstman, is saying about his
client. So the publishers might want to come up with a different
approach. Not that so far they have had need of much defense
besides hiring Pat Schroeder, and this complacency is the most
remarkable thing of all.
An exasperated William Bennetta explained why so many
teachers accept inferior textbooks from these publishers, "[T]he
major schoolbook companies… have long recognized that the
teacher corps in America includes some desperate dumbbells,
and the companies have learned to produce books that the
dumbbells will like." Alistair B. Fraser, a professor of
meteorology who runs web sites exposing bad science in
textbooks, concluded bleakly, "Apparently, most teachers
believe everything they teach." To which I add, why not? Cornell
professor Donald Hayes, quoted in the Grandfather Education
Report, reported on results of sampling 788 textbooks used
between 1860 and 1992: "Honors high school texts are no more
difficult than an eighth grade reader was before World War II."
(And in an essay written over half a century ago Randall Jarrell
complained that 1930's textbooks were much easier than the
ones from the 19th century!) So by now our teachers, and their
teachers, and their teachers, have been dragged through the
same swamp of bad textbooks. They know not what they do,
and they know not that they know not.
And the same might be true of the parents, school boards, and
the culture at large. It may be that our culture has already
dropped below the critical mass necessary to transmit learning,
reason, traditions, and values from one generation to the next.
That is, our culture can no longer pass itself on -- an eventuality
that, to be sure, many would welcome. For example, a posting
on joannejacobs.com, which discussed the Gossai case, chided
Jacobs: "So sad to see that Joanne is still stuck in that
patriarchal, Ice People view of absolute truth."
But that is the worst case. If we Ice People are not yet at the
point of no return, then our first priority must be, "No teacher,
but every textbook, left behind." Upgrading our teachers'
preparation in their subject field will be wildly expensive, even if
possible for some of them. But a modest beginning is possible
without razing hundreds of schools of education: if we want, say,
a teacher who is prepared to present more challenging material
to 8th grade students, one is already available down the hall,
teaching the 9th or 10th grade. As for those in the 11th and 12th
grades, this nation has a surplus of under-employed college
graduates. Better yet, most of them do not have degrees in
education.
We have learned this, if nothing else, from the selective
prosecution of Mr. Gossai: con a few people, and it's a felony;
con millions, and it's educating the youth of America. Or, as
Abraham Washington, for whom we get a day off in March,
remarked to Harriet Beecher Tubman as they rowed
undocumented immigrants across the Potomac to Cordoba,
"You can fool some of the people all of the time."
Terry Graves is a freelance writer living near Pittsburgh. His
novel, Rain in Hell, is about original sin without, he hopes, being
yet another example of it.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com